Mainstay vs Fiverr

The difference is the unit of purchase. Fiverr sells a deliverable: a described output, at a stated price, bought like a product. Mainstay introduces you to a person and takes no part in whatever you agree with them. Almost everything else follows from that.

What Fiverr is good at

The package is the brief. For a small, well-defined job — a logo, a subtitle pass, a short edit, a translation, a cleanup — the gig format removes work you would otherwise have to do yourself: scoping, quoting, negotiating, and writing something down that both sides accept. Buying the package is the agreement. That is a genuinely good product, and for that job it is a better one than this.

Speed. Decision to delivery, with nothing to arrange in between. Nothing on this site is that fast.

A defined price before you commit. You know what it costs before anyone starts. On Mainstay, what someone charges is what their record says they charge, and the number you eventually agree is between the two of you.

Recourse attached to the purchase. The transaction happens on the platform, so the platform can do something about it when it goes wrong. Mainstay cannot: money never passes through this site, and there is no escrow, no milestones and no mediation here.

What Mainstay is

A directory. You browse records, and $49 a month buys 100 contact reveals (pricing) — one reveal is one person’s email address, phone number and portfolio link, yours for good once spent. There are no packages, no delivery dates, no order and nothing to check out. What you agree afterwards is yours to arrange.

What the record carries instead of a package:

The standard — seven numbered clauses, versioned, dated, published in full under CC BY 4.0. Every record was read against it before publication and prints which clauses it cleared and when.

An identity checked against a government-issued document before the record could be published. The record says which of the two it was: the automatic check, which Stripe runs and whose images never reach us, or a check done here by a person.

A weekly check. Every Mainstayer confirms they are active each week. Miss one and the record leaves every list a client sees. Each record prints its twelve-week attendance history (how we verify).

What a buyer pays on Fiverr

Fiverr’s help centre states it plainly: “The service fee covers Fiverr’s administrative costs. It’s 5.5% of your purchase amount, plus $3.50 for orders under $200. You can review it before you confirm payment.” (Fiverr’s help centre on paying for orders, read 2026-08-14.) The $3.50 is an addition below $200 rather than a floor, so a $50 order costs $50 plus $2.75 plus $3.50, and a $500 order costs $500 plus $27.50.

If you go and check that and find nothing added at your checkout, you are probably in a region where Fiverr has already folded it into the price: “we have updated how prices are displayed in select regions so that the amount you see is the amount you pay” (Fiverr’s help centre on price upfront, read 2026-08-14). The fee is the same either way; only where it is shown has changed.

There is a second charge you do not see at all, on the other side. Fiverr tells sellers “for every order you complete, you earn 80% of the purchase amount” (Fiverr’s help centre on the earnings page, read 2026-08-14) — a fifth of the money, which is priced into what you were quoted. All three of those quotes come from Fiverr’s help centre, because `fiverr.com`’s terms of service and payment terms both returned HTTP 403 to this session.

Neither charge has an equivalent here: nothing you agree with a freelancer passes through this site, so there is nothing for a service fee to sit on. What you pay instead is $49 in a month whether you hire somebody or nobody, which is the worse deal on a single small job and the better one on a relationship that lasts.

What is not here that a catalogue has

No reviews and no star ratings. No revisions policy. No delivery date, no order status and nothing to cancel. No messaging — when you spend a reveal you get an email address and a phone number, and the conversation happens wherever you would normally have it. No refunds on work, because the money never came here to be refunded.

A register that ran orders would be a marketplace, and it would need a commission to pay for the machinery. Those are still absences, and if any one of them is what you were relying on, rely on it somewhere else.

A short test for which one you want

Can you write down what you want delivered, in one sentence, and would you accept it if it arrived exactly as described? Buy the package. Does somebody have to look at the problem before anyone can say what the deliverable is, or do you expect to be working with the same person again next month? Hire the person.

Most jobs answer that question immediately, and the wrong tool is usually picked out of habit.

The one structural difference worth stating

A catalogue is priced per deliverable and a register is priced per introduction. If your work arrives as a series of separable packages, per-deliverable is the unit and paying for introductions is overhead. If your work arrives as an ongoing relationship with one person, per-introduction is the unit and paying per deliverable becomes a recurring tax on a relationship that was established long ago.

You pay a subscription instead of a percentage of everything you ever pay them. That is the whole argument for this shape, and it only wins when the relationship lasts.

When Mainstay is the wrong choice

Your job is one small, defined thing. Buy it from a catalogue. Do not pay for a month of access to arrange yourself what a package already arranges.

You want to hire one person for two hours and never again. $49 for a single introduction is poor value.

You need it delivered by a date, with somebody accountable for the date. Mainstay has no delivery dates, no order status and nobody to escalate to. A packaged purchase does.

You want your money back if the work is wrong. We never held your money, so there is nothing here to refund. Buy where the transaction happens, or hold your own money back by paying in stages you agreed directly.